


On Waking

by thinlizzy2



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, References to canon character deaths, References to racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-06 17:23:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4230429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinlizzy2/pseuds/thinlizzy2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five people Hawkeye dreamed about after the war, and one who he actually met again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Trapper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [krisherdown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/krisherdown/gifts).



I - Trapper John McIntyre

The dreams of Trapper had started even before the war ended, but Hawkeye had always assumed - for whatever reason - that they would stop once he got back home.

He was sadly mistaken.Even in safe little Crabapple Cove, a world away from that Korean hell where he and Trapper had met and laughed and drank and parted, the dreams followed him. 

He would come home from the clinic pleasantly weary from his day spent patching boo-boos and giving inoculations. He'd eat his dinner - anything but liver or fish - and then have a sensible number of drinks for a healthy young man who had to be at work by nine the next day.

And then he'd have a couple more.

So he was always somewhat woozy when he climbed into bed, and maybe that was what triggered it. Or perhaps there was a mosquito in the room buzzing in his ear or a chopper flying overhead or maybe it was the smell of his unwashed laundry if he'd been a bit lazy; he could never figure out exactly what the trigger was. But he'd close his eyes and drift all the way back to The Swamp. 

It was like it had been in the early days, with Frank sneering in the corner and Radar's voice on the tannoy. He would look around and see Trap, propped against a pile of pillows, grinning cheekily as he read his copies of _Field and Stream_. And even though he was suddenly back in a place that he'd been happy to leave forever, he was glad to see his old friend, and so he smiled and waved.

Trapper didn't wave back.

In fact, he never even acknowledged Hawkeye's presence. He went about his duties and his pleasures, checking on patients and performing surgeries, flirting with nurses and tormenting Frank, while never once seeing or hearing his Hawkeye. For his part, Hawkeye drifted along beside him, as helpless and insubstantial as a ghost, unable to make his presence known.

At first, this merely confused Hawkeye. Then it frightened him. He became more and more desperate to be seen, screaming and hollering, knocking things over. It was all to no avail.

The rage came next.

Without thinking he raised a fist, ready to strike Trapper, to punch some sense into him. He lunged forward, more than ready to cause pain if that was what was needed.

His fist passed, unnoticed, through Trapper's chest.

That was the point at which he always woke up. And then, covered in cold sweat and tangled in the bed sheets, he ached for a friendship that had meant so much, and yet had been abandoned, forever unfinished, half a world away.

If that hadn't really mattered, what did?


	2. BJ

II - BJ Hunnicutt

The dreams about BJ were an altogether different kind of nightmare.

He was himself, Hawkeye, but he was also BJ. Maybe he was inside BJ's skin or maybe he was just slipping into his consciousness for a bit; it didn't matter. The situation didn't feel strange or frightening. Sitting behind BJ's eyes, he felt a warm sort of contentment, just sipping at the steaming coffee that blonde pretty Peg brought to him and eating her scrumptious scrambled eggs and toast.

Enjoyment became delight when little Erin came running down the stairs. She was already taller than she had been in BJ's photographs and her hair was longer; time was passing as it should, and luckily her father was back to see it progress.

Erin ran to her mother first, greeting her with a giggling hug. Then she bent down to address her mother's belly in a playful voice, and for the first time Hawkeye noticed the gentle swelling under Peg's apron. He felt a thrill of joy when he realized what that meant.

And then the young girl came skipping over to hug her daddy.

Hawkeye embraced her eagerly. He felt the delicate, bird-like bones in her shoulders and arms, and named each one in his head. He smelled the healthy animal fragrance of her hair.

When Erin pulled away, she was caked with blood.

Thick, purple and viscous, it covered every inch of her body that had touched her father. Her pretty cotton dress looked like it had been dragged through a slaughterhouse and rivulents of red streamed down her skin. There were globs of it in her hair, from where he'd rested his chin on top of her head during their hug.

Even before Erin began shrieking, Hawkeye knew that it was all his fault. He had failed to keep BJ pristine, to return him to his wife and daughter as undamaged as he had been when he came. Because of the part of his life that he'd shared with Hawkeye, the ugly, spurting, slashing part - BJ would never be able to look at his daughter the same way that he had before. He would never be able to soothe her small injuries without thinking of other little girls who endured far worse, fix her a snack without worrying about the hungry kids he'd left behind, or even hold her without remembering the weight of dead children's bodies.

As Erin Hunnicutt hollered out her anger and horror, Hawkeye could only whisper useless apologies that neither she or her father would ever hear.


	3. Klinger

III - Max Klinger

As horrific as these dreams are, he can usually manage to drive them from his mind once the morning comes. After all, they are clearly _dreams_ , with all the hallmarks that come with that. So even though Hawkeye dreaded the nights, he was usually able to focus during the days.

The major exception was when he had dreamt of Klinger the night before.

For while his dreams of Trapper and BJ were tinged with thankful unreality, the same could not be said of the Klinger dreams. Those were far _far_ too real.

He dreamed of Klinger coming home, finally, after so many failed ludicrous attempts to get discharged. His hopeful, innocent, stupid grin would be plastered all over his face, thinking he was going home to the baseball, home-cooked meals and front-stoop chats of the Toledo of his boyhood. He would reach for Soon Lee, so excited to show her the land of milk and honey that he'd been talking about since they met. He had a promise of a good job with his uncle's moving company and they could stay with his parents until they saved up enough to get a place of their own. Life was going to be sweet.

But in Hawkeye's dreams, nothing would go as Klinger planned. His mother would be stiffly formal, clearly uncomfortable, while his father would constantly talk about how nice Max's ex-wife was looking lately, and how she was still single. It could just have been old loyalties coming into play, but neither of his parents had ever liked Laverne, so that didn't make much sense.

And then his uncle had to let him go. Sure, business was slow and there was no denying it, but Klinger worked a lot harder than a bunch of the other guys, so why did he have to be the one laid off? 

When business suddenly picked up after his departure, he began to understand.

With every job he failed to get, it became clearer. And when Soon Lee would come home red-eyed and subdued after what should have been a routine trip to the shops, then there was no doubt left.

The nature of the abuse varied from night to night. Sometimes the Klingers would be subjected to vicious slurs; other night Hawkeye would dream of threats. In some truly horrific nightmares, there was violence. In all cases, waking up offered no relief at all. 

Because everything he saw in his dreams could really be happening to his dear friend and his sweet wife. On some level, it almost certainly was.

Because they hadn't fought or won a just war, a war against evil or for equality. All of that misery and suffering, it hadn't improved anything. The world was still full of shitty people and their shitty opinions,and all the wheeling and dealing Klinger had done during the war, all the lives his quick mind and clever tongue had managed to save, none of it mattered once he got back home. Because he was up against a much tougher enemy and enmeshed in a far longer war.

That was why Hawkeye got into the habit of tossing any letters from Klinger into a drawer, unopened. He promised himself, every time, that he would read them all soon, and every time he knew that he was lying. He hated himself for that, even more when he started telling the operator to refuse calls from Toledo, but what else could he do?

All of his nightmares were so vivid, so horrific, that he couldn't take the chance of learning that one of them might be true. If one was real then all of them could be, and he simply could not run the risk of that being the case.


	4. Her

IV - Her

She crushed the baby to her chest, smothering it to death. It broke her heart to do it, but she was terrified and so many lives were at risk and the foreign doctor wouldn't stop screaming at her, and so she panicked. Hawkeye wanted stop her, to beg her to stop, to pull the child away and save its little life.

But instead he watched. And nodded. And made her do it again and again for so many nights and oh god oh shit oh fuck he'd rather never sleep again than have to have that dream even one more time.


	5. Sidney

V - Sidney Freedman

The world was a sickening alcoholic blur. Hawkeye could taste cheap gin seeping into the sores in his mouth like slow-moving poison. Somehow rotten and sharp all at once, the booze was filling up his whole head, dripping into his noise so he could drown from it, making his eyes burn and sting, rushing in his ears with an irregular _whoosh-whoosh_ that he dimly recognized as also bring his own heartbeat. It was inside of him and it was everywhere and there was no place he could go where he wouldn't drag it around with him.

(Why did he even still drink the cheap stuff anyway? He was home now and he had access to good alcohol. Why did he continue to torture himself?)

There was no one distinct light source that he could black out or turn away from. Instead, the light seemed to be coming from all around him. It was too bright everywhere he looked, and somehow Hawkeye knew that meant that he'd fallen asleep - or, rather, passed out - in the middle of the day again. Even in his unconsciousness, he knew that was a bad thing, possibly even as bad as the fact that certain nightmares reoccurred so often now that he could decode them. He felt a brief flash of panic at the situation, but the next wave of nausea washed it away, along with any desire to save himself.

(He drank cheap gin because that was the only kind he could get drunk on now. The war had stolen away his ability to enjoy good things the way he should. Only the dirty and the broken could touch him now.)

A figure came out of the light. Hawkeye couldn't tell if it was walking towards him or simply forming out of the nothingness, but it didn't matter. He cringed, crying out. This never meant anything good.

Sometimes it turned out to be a Korean person, an innocent civilian or unwilling draftee who stared at Hawkeye with eyes that openly accused him of being just like all the other Americans who had promised so much and then left a country in ruins with nothing good to show for it. Or else it was an American, a kid from home who'd once promised his girl he'd be back before she knew it except he wouldn't because he died with his bullet-perforated guts all over Hawkeye's operating table. One horrible time it had been Henry Blake, still in his going-home suit but bloodied and fish-eaten, demanding to know why Hawkeye hadn't even tried to save him the way he had done for so many others. 

After that dream, Hawkeye had sworn never to drink himself to sleep ever again. His resolve had lasted nearly four days.

A firm hand clasped his shoulder and he flinched, awaiting a harder blow. But that never came. Finally, anticipating the pain became worse than the idea of the pain itself, so Hawkeye forced himself to look into the eyes of his assailant.

Calm brown eyes gazed back at him. "Get help," Sidney said, his voice solemn but gentle. "You need help, Hawkeye."

"Help me then!" Hawkeye was shocked by the anger in his own voice.

"I can't." Sidney shook his head regretfully. "You need to help yourself."

And then Sidney was gone, back to wherever it was that he'd come from. All that was left was the hostile light and the acidic taste of vomit in Hawkeye's mouth.

When he woke up he sobbed for an hour, and then he reached for the phone.


	6. Frank

I - Frank Burns

The church basement where the group met was depressing as hell but there wasn't a lot of funding for palatial settings for veterans' support groups, despite the huge number of vets who'd come back from Korea with something wrong in their heads. Hawkeye had made a point of choosing a group a fair drive away from Crabapple Cove but he still felt horribly exposed as he sat there, listening to man after man approach the podium to tell their stories. In a way he was ashamed; so many of those gathered there had had it much worse than him during by the war. They'd been posted to the front, shot at, taken as POWs. One kid openly wept during his description of his service; another spoke in a monotone that was terrifying to listen to. A third picked at his nails until Hawkeye knew they must have been bleeding as he told his story.

Hawkeye fidgeted uncomfortably as he contemplated making a run for the door. Technically, nothing was stopping him from leaving, but the group of listeners was so silent and serious that it would have felt sacrilegious to just get up and walk away. Still maybe he could fake the need for a toilet break? His head shot up as the door creaked open. Could this be the time to make a subtle break for it?

His eyes widened and his jaw dropped. Major Frank Burns, every squirmy and uncomfortable inch of him, stood framed in the doorway. Hawkeye stared at him unabashedly, and Frank stared right back. The electric tension that filled the room was so obvious to everyone that even the traumatized vet at the front stopped talking to gawk at them. 

Frank cleared his throat, gave one of his practiced, unconvincing smiles and apologized to the speaker, muttering something about traffic. Then he carefully picked his way around the circle to one of the few empty seats that remained.

Next to Hawkeye. 

The endless speeches blurred away into background noise as Hawkeye tried to gather his thoughts. What was Frank, the ultimate warmonger (at least from a safe distance from the front) doing there among the angry and damaged? For that matter, what was Frank doing _there_ , so far away from his wife and his daughters and his practice, from everything that had previously sheltered and defined him.

Frank stared straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge Hawkeye or their previous experience together any further. But the rising color in his cheeks and the nervous twitching of a muscle in his jaw showed his discomfort with the situation and hinted at a few questions of his own.

Frank's eyes darted towards Hawkeye and, for a second, their gazes met again. Frank gave a little cough to cover up whatever it was he almost said, and then stared at the floor. His face was that of a child, sulkiness covering fear.

And Hawkeye realized the truth.

It didn't matter what had brought Frank Burns to this dank basement in Maine on a rainy Wednesday night, when he should have had a million preferable places to be. Nor was it important that, out of everyone he had shared his time in Korea with, Frank was probably the one he'd have cared the least about ever seeing again. What mattered was that someone else had lived in the same tent as him, known the same people, eaten the same shitty food and cut up the same poor bastards that Hawkeye had. 

And someone else had found it intolerable.

The relief he felt was akin to that of finding a fellow traveler stranded in a faraway land, as lost and confused as he was but at least speaking a language he understood. He wasn't _alone_ in his inability to cope with the memories anymore, and in this particular situation a companion was just as good as a friend.

After two or three sessions, they would go out to eat. Hawkeye would learn about the growing chasm between Frank and his wife, the disdain of his daughters when their father would shake or stammer uncontrollably and the make-or-break relocation to Maine that had only highlighted just how broken everything already was. He would learn about the flashbacks that only got worse the more Frank tried to suppress them and which had led to his humiliating dismissal from the hospital board position he'd strove for his whole life. And Hawkeye would tell his own story, the specifics of his own particular traumas, and he would know that he was heard.

But at that particular moment, as the speaker finished up and the facilitator asked who would like to go next, they were simply two of several men who raised their hands.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for krisherdown, for NPT 2015


End file.
